30
Hand of the Almighty
A stone gate barred the entrance to Trinity College. Cut into the gate was a
small wooden door. I stepped through it. A porter in a black overcoat and
bowler hat showed me around the college, leading me through Great Court,
the largest of the courtyards. We walked through a stone passageway and into
a covered corridor whose stone was the color of ripe wheat.
“This is the north cloister,” the porter said. “It is here that Newton stomped
his foot to measure the echo, calculating the speed of sound for the first
time.”
We returned to the Great Gate. My room was directly opposite it, up three
flights of stairs. After the porter left I stood, bookended by my suitcases, and
stared out my little window at the mythic stone gate and its otherworldly
battlements. Cambridge was just as I remembered: ancient, beautiful. I was
different. I was not a visitor, not a guest. I was a member of the university.
My name was painted on the door. According to the paperwork, I belonged
here.
I dressed in dark colors for my first lecture, hoping I wouldn’t stand out,
but even so I didn’t think I looked like the other students. I certainly didn’t
sound like them, and not just because they were British. Their speech had a
lilting cadence that made me think of singing more than speaking. To my ears
they sounded refined, educated; I had a tendency to mumble, and when
nervous, to stutter.
I chose a seat around the large square table and listened as the two students
nearest me discussed the lecture topic, which was Isaiah Berlin’s two
concepts of liberty. The student next to me said he’d studied Isaiah Berlin at
Oxford; the other said he’d already heard this lecturer’s remarks on Berlin
when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge. I had never heard of Isaiah
Berlin.